The Skeleton Crew Read Online Free
Author: Deborah Halber
The Boston Globe of a woman with well-shaped eyebrows and a sensitive mouth. She had deep-set eyes and luxurious auburn hair swept back off her high forehead in a ponytail.
She looked familiar, like someone I might see running along the shoulder of my suburban street or waiting in line at Starbucks, but the colors in the picture struck me as garish and her expression eerily bland, as if she were posing for a Disneyesque mug shot. Then I realized what I was looking at wasnât a photograph at all.
It was a digitally constructed approximation of what a murder victim looked like before her face decomposed.
In 1974, the story said, a woman had been found dead on a beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts, her hands chopped off at the wrists, her skull bashed in. She was nude, lying on a thick beach blanket, a pair of Wrangler jeans neatly folded under her almost-severed head. Her toenails were painted a bubble-gum pink. She had been dead for days, maybe weeks. The local police chief called the murder horrific, brutal for any time and any place, but particularly shocking for Provincetown.
I knew Provincetown as an artsy community at the end of the stunning Cape Cod National Seashore, a great place to spend a summer weekend but an unlikely setting for the lurid, the sensational, the sinister. Amazingly, despite years of effort by investigators, thousands of tips, two exhumations, DNA tests, and directives from psychics, no one had ever identified the redhead. Now a new, go-getter police chief was reopening the case on the chance that state-of-the-art forensic techniques would provide a name and a history for the woman who was known only as the Lady of the Dunes.
Considering its subject had been dead for more than thirty years, the reconstruction in the Globe was startlingly lifelike. Even the new chief, a tough-guy Vin Diesel look-alike with a shaved head, noted kind of wistfully that she had beautiful hair. She had also had thousands of dollarsâ worth of dental work, yet no dentist had ever stepped forward with records that matched her teeth.
The Lady of the Dunes belongs to a certain category of unidentified victimâyoung, attractive, femaleâthat communities tend to fetishize. She was buried under a flat stone the size of a sheet of loose-leaf paper at the edge of a grassy field adjacent to austere gray-shingled St. Peter the Apostle church in Provincetown, the marker engraved âUnidentified Female Body Found Race Point Dunesâ along with the date she was discovered: July 26, 1974. Flowers still appear regularly at her grave, and people make pilgrimages to hers and other unidentified victimsâ resting places as if to sacred sites.
Over the next few days I kept thinking that the Provincetown murder victim must have been someoneâs daughter, maybe someoneâs mother, sister, aunt, or cousin. How could no one miss her? How could she have ended up in a quaint Cape Cod town one hot summer day, never to be heard from again, and how could her disappearance have raised not the slightest alarm among her relatives, friends, coworkers? Why did no one ever report her missing? And if someone had, how had no one made the connection to the Lady of the Dunes?
At least three Provincetown police chiefs consumed with her case swore to solve it; all retired, defeated, as the years passed. Incredibly, a new suspect in her murder would be identified in 2012 as I wrapped up research on this book.
Iâm not particularly spiritual, but I felt sad for the Lady of the Dunes, a young woman robbed of her history, her future, and something we all take for granted: a name. Everyone I talked to agreed that it seemed impossible.If by a random stroke of bad luck I became a victim of a fatal accident or a deadly attack far from home, I was pretty confident word would make it back to someone who cared about me. And yet the thought nagged at me.
I closed the newspaper and went to my computer, where Googling âLady of
She looked familiar, like someone I might see running along the shoulder of my suburban street or waiting in line at Starbucks, but the colors in the picture struck me as garish and her expression eerily bland, as if she were posing for a Disneyesque mug shot. Then I realized what I was looking at wasnât a photograph at all.
It was a digitally constructed approximation of what a murder victim looked like before her face decomposed.
In 1974, the story said, a woman had been found dead on a beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts, her hands chopped off at the wrists, her skull bashed in. She was nude, lying on a thick beach blanket, a pair of Wrangler jeans neatly folded under her almost-severed head. Her toenails were painted a bubble-gum pink. She had been dead for days, maybe weeks. The local police chief called the murder horrific, brutal for any time and any place, but particularly shocking for Provincetown.
I knew Provincetown as an artsy community at the end of the stunning Cape Cod National Seashore, a great place to spend a summer weekend but an unlikely setting for the lurid, the sensational, the sinister. Amazingly, despite years of effort by investigators, thousands of tips, two exhumations, DNA tests, and directives from psychics, no one had ever identified the redhead. Now a new, go-getter police chief was reopening the case on the chance that state-of-the-art forensic techniques would provide a name and a history for the woman who was known only as the Lady of the Dunes.
Considering its subject had been dead for more than thirty years, the reconstruction in the Globe was startlingly lifelike. Even the new chief, a tough-guy Vin Diesel look-alike with a shaved head, noted kind of wistfully that she had beautiful hair. She had also had thousands of dollarsâ worth of dental work, yet no dentist had ever stepped forward with records that matched her teeth.
The Lady of the Dunes belongs to a certain category of unidentified victimâyoung, attractive, femaleâthat communities tend to fetishize. She was buried under a flat stone the size of a sheet of loose-leaf paper at the edge of a grassy field adjacent to austere gray-shingled St. Peter the Apostle church in Provincetown, the marker engraved âUnidentified Female Body Found Race Point Dunesâ along with the date she was discovered: July 26, 1974. Flowers still appear regularly at her grave, and people make pilgrimages to hers and other unidentified victimsâ resting places as if to sacred sites.
Over the next few days I kept thinking that the Provincetown murder victim must have been someoneâs daughter, maybe someoneâs mother, sister, aunt, or cousin. How could no one miss her? How could she have ended up in a quaint Cape Cod town one hot summer day, never to be heard from again, and how could her disappearance have raised not the slightest alarm among her relatives, friends, coworkers? Why did no one ever report her missing? And if someone had, how had no one made the connection to the Lady of the Dunes?
At least three Provincetown police chiefs consumed with her case swore to solve it; all retired, defeated, as the years passed. Incredibly, a new suspect in her murder would be identified in 2012 as I wrapped up research on this book.
Iâm not particularly spiritual, but I felt sad for the Lady of the Dunes, a young woman robbed of her history, her future, and something we all take for granted: a name. Everyone I talked to agreed that it seemed impossible.If by a random stroke of bad luck I became a victim of a fatal accident or a deadly attack far from home, I was pretty confident word would make it back to someone who cared about me. And yet the thought nagged at me.
I closed the newspaper and went to my computer, where Googling âLady of
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